The big star live

Abstract

The analysis of stars was common for much of last century, in popular as much as academic discourses. For those observing from the outside, the relation between fan and star was one of identification, whereby the fan imaginarily compensates for self through an inflated ego-ideal of the star. Stars as modern-day divinities, objects of symbolism and ritual, stars as figures of identification and narcissistic projection; stars as ideological representations: these are important and worthwhile interpretations. Yet there is a growing gap between the phenomenon of stardom and strategies for interpreting it. Stardom has in some ways outstripped its interpretations. They are too universal to provide adequate descriptions of stardom as a specific and continuing cultural form. No doubt the urge to deify stars can be seen as analogous to or substitutive of pre-modern religious practices. No doubt such deifications can be correctly and productively analysed as variations on the basic theoretically constituted categories of narcissism and base/superstructure. Stardom is a specific organisation of such anthropological universals as religion, identification, exchange. What are the dimensions of this specificity and what theoretical tools are available for understanding it? Moving beyond the truism that idolising a star can be a veiled or articulated way of idolising one's self, what are the particular culturally or technologically nuanced components of the self in this case?

Acknowledgments

This is an edited extract from John Castles, Big Stars, API Network, Perth, 2008.

Notes

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 2. L Grossberg, ‘Putting the pop back into postmodernism’, in A Ross (ed.) Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1989, pp 183–4.

 3. ibid., p 183.

 4. ibid., p 186.

 5. J Castles, ‘Misery's child’, Social Semiotics, vol 2, no 1, 1992, pp 73–92.

 6. M Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, (trans.) E S Casey, A A Anderson, W Domingo and L Jacobson, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1973 (1953), p 48l.

 7. ibid., p 50, emphasis added.

 8. ibid., p 48.

 9. ibid., p 50.

10. See, for example, Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, (trans.) B Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1985, p 21ff; Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: The Experience of Music from Aristotle to Zappa, Picador, London, 1988, pp 41–2.

11. Dufrenne, op. cit., p 55.

12. Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance, PAJ Publications, New York, 1988, p 157.

13. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, (trans.) C Turner, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1990, p 70.

14. Meaghan Morris, Ecstasy and Economics: American Essays for John Forbes, EMPress, Sydney, 1992, pp 27–8.

15. ibid., p 26.

16. B Kapferer, Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, 1988.

17. Since taking up position ‘inside’ the state by being elected as the Australian Labor Party’s member for Kingsford Smith, Garrett has faced the contradiction between having popularity as a politically vocal superstar and seeking it as a mainstream politician [Ed.].

18. Rolling Stone, ‘What now?’, April 1987.

19. Lacoue-Labarthe, op. cit., pp 64–8.

20. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society, (trans.) C P Loomis, Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, 1957.

21. Sydney Morning Herald, 27 November 1993, p 3.

22. Turner, op. cit.

23. Eisenberg, op. cit., p 24.

24. ibid.

25. Attali, op. cit., pp 88–9.

26. ibid., pp 108–9.

27. ibid., p 108.

28. ibid., pp 118–19.

29. See the features by Triple J radio, ‘Pop eats itself’, in September 1991; and ABC TV, ‘Attitude’, in November 1993.

30. OilRag fan newsletter, 3, 1990.

31. G Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, (trans.) P Patton, Athlone Press, London, 1994.

32. M Horkheimer and T W Adorno, ‘The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, (trans.) J Cumming, Verso, London, 1972 (1944), pp 120–67.

33. J Hopkins and D Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1981, p 222.

34. Sun Herald, 29 August 1993, p 29.

35. Quoted in Turner, op. cit., p 158.

36. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, J Rée (ed.), (trans.) A Sheridan-Smith, NLB, London, 1976, p 256ff.

37. Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music, Omnibus Press, London, 1977, p 139.

38. L Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1986.